Amazon.co.uk Review
The central character in Sebastian Barry's novel Annie Dunne is a woman who has been pushed to the margins, a woman whom life has given few chances of happiness and fulfilment. Unmarried, she spends years as housekeeper to her brother-in-law because her sister is too ill to manage. Her sister dies, her brother-in-law remarries and Annie Dunne is homeless. Invited by her cousin Sarah, she moves to a small farm in a remote part of Wicklow. As the novel opens, the two cousins share their lives and the work on the farm. It is the late 1950s and rural Ireland is changing around them. Annie's nephew heads for London in search of work and leaves his young children with their great-aunt. Content with her life with Sarah, Annie also finds a new capacity for love in her feelings for the two children. Yet even the small pleasures that Annie finds in her life are threatened. An unlikely suitor pays court to Sarah. Her love for the children opens her up to pain almost as much as to happiness. Annie Dunne is a novel in which few external dramas occur--there is an accident with a pony and trap, one of the children goes temporarily missing--but Barry evokes superbly the inner dramas of his characters. In a society where emotions are often severely repressed and expressed only obliquely, small incidents hint at larger feelings and Barry has written a story in which these are subtly and poignantly unfolded.--Nick Rennison
Review
Driven from her home by a brother-in-law about to remarry, Annie Dunne has found her own peculiar haven at her cousin's farm in Wicklow. In the rigours of farm work and the ebbs and flows of a rural community, Annie carves a tough, but seemingly impregnable existence. When Annie's nephew brings his children to stay for the summer, she is given a rare opportunity for love, pleasure and adventure. Almost inevitably though, her new-found joy is threatened by outside and sometimes intangible forces - awakening sexuality, creeping modernity, animosity, family shame and, not least, Annie herself. A poetically written, finely wrought novel which subtly transforms the reality of the narrative into something rich and strange.
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